COMIC BOOK FAN? GO STRAIGHT TO 'HELLBOY'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

FUNNY, DERANGED, artful and really kind of sweet, ``Hellboy'' deserves to be more than your average comic book movie. But in the end, that's all it is, although graced with the aforementioned flourishes.

Based on Mike Mignola's well-drawn graphic novels, it's about a hell-spawned demon who just happened to be intercepted as an imp by a kindly supernatural researcher, who raised it to be a working-class hero. Hellboy's job is cleaning up the messes that evil men and their own dark deities make. During his off time, in the secret Newark lair of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, HB unwinds by drinking gallons of beer, smoking up boxes of cigars, scarfing down mountains of pancakes and candy bars, and communing with his menagerie of pet cats - the only earthly creatures, we can assume, that the anti-social, arrested adolescent really relates to.

Ron Perlman, who has worked with director Guillermo del Toro in ``Cronos'' and ``Blade II,'' could not be better cast as the swaggering, scarlet-skinned Hellboy. A pointy-tailed curmudgeon with near-invincible powers and brow horns he files down for that chic, aviator goggle look, he's a massive everyman misfit that only Vincent from TV's ``Beauty and the Beast'' could invest with shards of humanity.

And Perlman does the character work as well as the formidable physical assignment (reportedly, everything but the actor's eyelids were covered with some kind of latex appliance). The film's most beguiling bits involve Hellboy's unrequited love for BPRD co-worker Liz Sherman. Played by Selma Blair in a rare noncomedic register, Liz is a haunted woman who can't control her power to start fires. Being from, well, hell, our hero is perfectly designed to get close to her. But there's that tail, those horn stumps, the immature attitude ... .

If this is starting to sound a lot like an X-Men super soap opera, that's not by accident. ``Hellboy'' the movie is itself an unholy spawn of the mutant series and ``Men in Black's'' gooey space monster burlesque, midwifed through the much more chilling cosmology of ancient devil gods that H.P. Lovecraft cooked up in 1930s horror pulps.

There are also Nazis. And Rasputin. And an assassin filled with sand where his blood should be. And a half-fish guy with ESP. And a giant mechanical death abyss. And a corpse's torso that tells jokes in Russian. And ...

As with most of del Toro's creep shows, ``Hellboy'' keeps hinting at a significance beyond its genre basics, but that really doesn't resonate in the way that the work of top horror auteurs, such as David Cronenberg and Tim Burton, can. However, due to a discernible faithfulness to the source material, ``Hellboy'' is certainly del Toro's wittiest, most visually diverse feature to date.

So why does it feel like so many other comic book movies? The devil knows.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

HELLBOY - Three stars

(PG-13: violence, language)

Starring: Ron Perlman, John Hurt, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, Karel Roden, Jeffrey Tambor, Doug Jones, Brian Steele, Ladislav Beran.

Director: Guillermo del Toro.

Running time: 2 hr. 2 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Lots of cool, kinky and warmly funny details in this adaptation of the demon-hero comic book. But it still degenerates into action fantasy cliches.

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Photo:

Rupert Evans, left, takes some advice from Ron Perlman, who has the title role in ``Hellboy.''